A New York City map highlighting immigrant neighborhoods across the five boroughs managed to omit one of the most famous immigrant enclaves in American history, Little Italy, and the backlash arrived fast, loud, and from an unexpected corner of Hollywood.
Robert Davi, the 75-year-old actor known for roles in Die Hard and Licence to Kill, posted a video on X tearing into Mayor Zohran Mamdani after the city's "New York City Immigrant Enclaves" map resurfaced on social media earlier this week. Users noticed the map, which highlights 30 immigrant communities across the boroughs, left out Little Italy, along with historically Jewish and Irish neighborhoods, Fox News Digital reported.
Italian American groups piled on with their own criticism. By Friday, Mamdani was fielding questions about the omission at an unrelated press conference, and the city announced plans to update the map.
Davi, born in Astoria, Queens, did not hold back. In his video, he called Mamdani a "leftist Marxist Communist" and a "jerk," and invoked his own family's immigrant roots to make the point that Italian Americans helped build the city the mayor now runs.
"My grandparents came from Sicily and Naples and they taught me, speak the English. This is America. God bless America."
He went further, citing his grandfather's military service.
"My grandfather enlisted in World War I and got wounded three times... he helped build New York City as an immigrant, an Italian immigrant."
The actor also told Mamdani to "go back to where you were born" and said the mayor "don't belong in America", language that will draw its own debate, but that reflects a raw frustration shared by many New Yorkers who feel their heritage is being quietly sidelined by a progressive city government more interested in newer identity categories than in the communities that shaped the city's character for over a century.
Davi even floated the idea of a constitutional amendment to prevent Mamdani from holding office, a reference that appears connected to broader questions about the mayor's administration and its political direction.
The map in question is titled "New York City Immigrant Enclaves" and marks 30 communities across the five boroughs. Mamdani said at his Friday press conference that the map was originally created by the prior administration in 2023. His team inherited it and, he said, "added a few additional neighborhoods."
What the current administration did not add, until the controversy forced the issue, was Little Italy. Or historically Jewish neighborhoods. Or historically Irish ones.
That is a striking set of omissions. Between the 1880s and 1924, more than four million Italians immigrated to the United States, and roughly one-third of them settled in New York City, per the Library of Congress. Little Italy in Lower Manhattan became one of the most iconic immigrant communities in the country. Its name is still on the street signs.
The fact that a city map meant to celebrate immigrant heritage managed to skip over Italian, Jewish, and Irish communities, three groups whose labor, culture, and sacrifice are woven into every block of the city, is the kind of oversight that does not feel accidental to the people it erases. Whether it was carelessness or something more deliberate, the result is the same: a map that reflects a narrow, politically fashionable vision of what counts as an immigrant community.
At his Friday press conference, Mamdani tried to defuse the situation. He pointed to the map's origins under the prior administration and framed the omissions as a matter of incompleteness, not intent.
"It's clearly not an exhaustive list of the more than 200 ethnic communities that call our city home, and we're going to be making additional changes in the future to reflect that and that includes Little Italy."
That explanation has a certain bureaucratic logic to it. But it raises its own questions. Mamdani's administration inherited the map, reviewed it, and chose to add neighborhoods, just not Little Italy, and not the Jewish or Irish enclaves either. If the map was "clearly not exhaustive," why didn't anyone on his staff notice the most glaring gaps before social media did?
When Fox News Digital reached out to the mayor's office for comment, a spokesperson directed the outlet to Mamdani's press conference remarks. No additional statement was provided.
The mayor, born in Kampala, Uganda, moved to the United States at age seven. His administration has already faced a string of controversies, from a Mamdani aide confronting ABC executives over antisemitism accusations to policy clashes that have drawn legal challenges.
The map flap does not exist in isolation. It lands in a political environment where Mamdani has repeatedly drawn fire for what critics see as a selective approach to New York's history and identity. His America 250 speech targeted ICE, wealthy elites, and federal immigration enforcement, framing that struck many as more interested in ideological posturing than in honoring the full sweep of the city's immigrant story.
Meanwhile, his $70 million city-owned grocery plan has drawn a constitutional challenge from a gubernatorial candidate who invoked a 150-year-old state constitution clause to block the initiative. The mayor's political plate is full, and the map controversy adds another course.
The deeper issue is not really about cartography. It is about who gets remembered and who gets memory-holed. Italian Americans, Jewish Americans, and Irish Americans did not just pass through New York. They built its bridges, dug its tunnels, ran its firehouses, stocked its delis, and filled its churches and synagogues. Their neighborhoods are not footnotes. They are the foundation.
New York City has now said it will update the map to include Little Italy. No specific timeline for the revision has been announced. It remains unclear which historically Jewish and Irish neighborhoods, also omitted, will be added, or when.
The unnamed Italian American groups that raised the alarm deserve credit for forcing the correction. So does Davi, whatever one thinks of his rhetorical style. Without public pressure, the map would still be sitting on a city website, celebrating 30 immigrant communities while pretending three of the most consequential ones never existed.
The full scope of the map controversy has put Mamdani's administration on defense yet again, and the explanation that the prior administration started it does not go very far when your team had every chance to fix the problem and chose not to.
New York has always been a city of immigrants. That is not a talking point; it is a historical fact documented in census rolls, ship manifests, and gravestones. But the question the map controversy raises is whether the current political class in City Hall sees all immigrants as equally worth honoring, or only the ones who fit a preferred narrative.
When you manage to build a map of immigrant New York that skips Little Italy, you are not celebrating diversity. You are curating it. And the people left off the map notice.
A city that forgets who built it has no business lecturing anyone about inclusion.